Cyberinfrastructure in New York State - Grid Computing: Infrastructure, Service, and Applications - page 33

2.2.2 Middleware Efforts

In the early 2000s, Miller's Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory had a vision
to design an integrated computational and data grid that would provide
disciplinary scientists with an easy-to-use extension of their desktops that
would enable breakthrough science and engineering. In order to provide
such a utility, the Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory partnered with the
Center for Computational Research* and other organizations in the Buffalo
area in order to create a prototype grid. This prototype, the Advanced
Computational Data Center Grid (ACDC-Grid), provided a platform for
the Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory to experiment with critical packages,
such as Globus and Condor, and to begin to work with critical worldwide
organizations, including the Open Science Grid.
However, the most important aspect of this prototype grid was that it
provided a platform upon which members of the Cyberinfrastructure
Laboratory could develop middleware that was deemed critical to the
deployment of a transparent and integrated computational-, data-, and
applications-oriented grid.

2.2.2.1 Grid Portal and Grid-Enabling Application Templates

A key project † was the development of a grid portal (cf. Roure , 2003, for a
discussion of grid portals). While it is true that Globus and other packages
provide a variety of avenues for command-line submission to a grid, most
require that the user be logged into a system upon which the appropriate
package (e.g., Globus or Condor) has been installed. The approach of the
Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory was to provide critical middleware that
was accessible to users worldwide through a Web browser.
The New York State Portal, as shown in Figure 2.1 for a package in molec-
ular structure determination (Miller et al., 1993, 1994; Rappleye et al., 2002;
Weeks and Miller, 1999; Weeks et al., 1994, 2002), can be found at http://
grid.ccr.buffalo.edu. This portal currently provides access to a dozen or so
compute-intensive software packages, large data storage devices, and the
ability to submit applications to a variety of grids consisting of tens of
thousands of processors. Our grid portal integrates several software pack-
ages and toolkits in order to produce a robust system that can be used to
host a wide variety of scientii c and engineering applications. Specii cally,
our portal is constructed using the Apache HTTP server, HTML, Java and
PHP scripting, PHPMyAdmin, MDS/GRIS/GIIS from the Globus Toolkit,
OpenLDAP, WSDL, and related open-source software that interfaces with
a MySQL database.

* Miller was director of the Center for Computational Research during this period.
† More details of this section can be found in Green and Miller (2003, 2004c).